Implosion (62 page)

Vajpayee had more talks with Musharraf in 2004 and then Manmohan Singh picked up on the initiatives when he became prime minister. The solution that was being worked out would not have led to any change on the borders, but aimed to make the Line of Control irrelevant with gradual demilitarization and devolved government. There would have been a ‘soft border’ with relaxed visa restrictions, cross-border travel and trade, the reunification of divided families and friends, and liaison arrangements on economic policy and other matters. Musharraf has said that the four-point agenda was not complete, but that wide agreement had been reached despite some hitches.
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This was, however, not approved (and might never have been) by the Pakistan army, nor by hard-line lobbies in either country, and the talks faded away when Musharraf faced increasing political problems in Pakistan and was ousted from office in 2008. Such a solution is not feasible now because India could not accept a soft border when Pakistan is wracked by the uncertainties of Taliban terrorism.

Relations next seemed to improve after the appointment of a young and personable 34-year-old Pakistan foreign minister, Hina Rabbani Khar. Visiting Delhi in July 2011, she spoke of a ‘mindset change’ in both countries and of a new generation seeing the relationship differently from the past.
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‘It is our desire to make the dialogue process uninterrupted and uninterruptible,’ she said. It sounded like 23 years earlier when Benazir Bhutto and Rajiv Gandhi, then young prime ministers of Pakistan and India, met in 1988 and brought a fresh but short-lived focus. Would this be any different? It was not clear what weight Khar’s words carried because of power being divided in Pakistan between the government, the military and the ISI – the signals were mixed and were undermined regularly by Pakistan’s aggressive and voluble interior minister, Rehman Malik.
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Some progress was made on visas, foreign direct investment, and India potentially receiving ‘most-favoured nation’ trading status (which it had given Pakistan 15 years earlier). Bilateral trade officially totals only some $2.5bn a year, plus perhaps another $3bn in informal links, mainly routed through the Gulf. There is an official target of $6–8bn, but that is unlikely to be realized because policy decisions are rarely implemented fully or quickly and there are only two cross-border airline flights a week – a fact that illustrates the tortuous relations.

Terrorism

The perennial question in India is how and why peace initiatives should be continued when they are regularly disrupted by actions allegedly originating in Pakistan – either terror attacks or clashes on the border – and when Pakistan does not rein in terrorists such as Hafiz Saeed, who roamed freely in the country despite being held responsible (by the US among others) for organizing attacks. ‘Pakistan is determined to confront us bilaterally, regionally and internationally. It infiicts wounds on us, through jihadi terrorism, for instance,’ says Kanwal Sibal, a former Indian foreign secretary, who favours a tough line.
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‘There is no other country that uses terrorism as an instrument of state policy towards us, or where jihadi groups openly exist and incite hatred towards India.’

Terrorism drove the countries close to full military conflict in December 2001, when there was an attack on the Indian parliament building in Delhi, significantly (and humiliatingly in Indian eyes) just five months after Vajpayee had hosted the Agra summit. The US and UK feared in December 2001 that India would stage a retaliatory attack that could have sparked a nuclear war, and the UK advised its nationals living in Delhi to be prepared to evacuate – a move that India condemned as diplomatic pressure to make it back off from a confrontation. On 26 November 2008, in a much bigger attack, now remembered as 26/11, terrorists arrived by sea in Mumbai and shot their way into the Taj and Oberoi hotels and other targets, killing 166 people. This led to increasing pressure in India, escalated by media coverage, to respond strongly in response to such threats and terrorism.

One method has been spelt out by G. Parthasarathy, a former senior diplomat and high commissioner to Pakistan (1998–2000), who says that during the Narasimha Rao government in the mid1990s, ‘acts of terrorism in India resulted in violence in populated centres like Karachi and Lahore’. As a consequence, ‘terrorism in Indian urban centres virtually ended’.
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Benazir Bhutto, then Pakistan’s prime minister, had ended a dialogue with India, so it might have been assumed that terrorist attacks would build up again in India, says Parthasarathy, but that did not happen. ‘Pakistansponsored terrorism in Punjab ended and was virtually non-existent across India, except in Jammu and Kashmir. This was largely because of measures by Narasimha Rao to ensure that Pakistan paid a high price on its territory for sponsoring terrorism in India’. I also remember from my time in India in the 1980s that, within a few days of a major atrocity in the Indian state of Punjab, there would frequently be civil unrest and bomb attacks in the Pakistani city of Karachi that exploited local sectarian, ethnic and other divisions.

Musharraf admitted such mutual attacks in a speech in India after he had been ousted from the presidency. In characteristically bombastic but semi-jocular style, he said that the two countries had done ‘a lot of meddling’ in each other’s internal affairs.
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‘Your RAW does exactly what the ISI does, and the ISI does exactly what RAW does,’ he said, referring to both countries’ secret services. ‘The past has been dirty the past has been bad, but don’t put the blame on Pakistan’.

A new factor for the Indian government is growing pressure from an excitable media, especially television chat show hosts who have become more strident in recent years and demand retribution rather than peace initiatives. Frequent cross-border clashes in 2013, after a ten-year lull, led to the beheading of an Indian soldier and other deaths.
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There was a media frenzy after the beheading with the chat shows raising the tempo to such a pitch that Manmohan Singh was forced to declare that it ‘cannot be business as usual’ with Pakistan.

There has also been pressure from the parliamentary opposition and it is likely that a BJP-led government, if elected in 2014, would take a tough stance. It would probably refuse to continue talks after terror attacks and instruct the army to react more aggressively to Pakistan firing across the LoC. ‘The biggest problem in our dealing with Pakistan has been our defensive attitude, our unwillingness to retaliate against Pakistan so that a price is imposed on it for its infractions,’ says Kanwal Sibal. He also lists as part of the problem ‘our reluctance to assume risks accompanying a tougher policy, our concerns about the reaction of the international community if we acted against Pakistan, our fear that if we did that, our policy of treating our differences with Pakistan bilaterally would be compromized as the issues would get internationalised’. Pakistan is also a factor in India’s internal politics because politicians believe that moderating reactions is assumed to win votes among India’s large Muslim population and ‘denote a more “secular” and less “anti-Muslim” bias’, says Sibal.

My Missed Kargil Scoop

It is not clear how much a civilian government in Pakistan knows about what its army and the ISI are doing. There has never been any doubt that the army dominates the government, sometimes from behind the scenes and sometimes openly. This became especially pertinent when Nawaz Sharif was re-elected prime minister in June 2013 – having been ousted from an earlier period in office in October 1999 by a coup organized by General Musharraf, the then army chief of staff, who made himself president. About seven months before he removed Sharif, Musharraf staged a mini-invasion in the mountains above the Indian town of Kargil, between the Kashmir capital of Srinagar and the Buddhist region of Ladakh.
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Musharraf claims that Sharif was briefed three times about the plans, but Sharif has always insisted that he was not told in advance, and that he had not therefore been deceiving India’s prime minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, when he welcomed him on a dramatic peacemaking trip on 20 February, 15 days after one of Sharif’s alleged Briefings on 5 February. Vajpayee crossed the land border at Wagah, between the Indian city of Amritsar and Lahore in Pakistan, and was feted by Sharif and other leaders, though the visit was boycotted by the armed service chiefs including Musharraf.
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The two prime ministers initiated a diplomatically significant cross-border bus service and signed the Lahore Declaration that started with the words: ‘Sharing a vision of peace and stability between their countries ’.
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If Sharif was briefed on 5 February, I missed the scoop of my career. I had joined him on a day-long helicopter tour so that I could catch a quick interview on the country’s politics and economy for
Fortune
magazine. We landed at Kel, a Pakistan army camp some 6,000ft up in the Himalayas, beside the Line of Control. I was introduced to Musharraf, who looked at me quizzically, and I chatted to more approachable army officers, asking about the mood in the country and the government’s stability, without a thought that I ought to be checking on an invasion. Musharraf took Sharif into a conference room with other aides and officers for what I was told was a routine border Briefing, and it lasted about an hour or so. They then went for prayers in the base’s mosque – it was a Friday – while I chatted to some of the more Westernized looking officers who declined to join them, and we flew off.

Musharraf started secretly sending infiltrators (out of uniform) across the LoC a few weeks later, and maybe had already been doing so for two months according to some reports.
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In his autobiography,
Line of Fire,
he says that the aim was to ‘fill large gaps between our defensive positions’, and that this had been approved in January 1999.
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‘Freedom fighters’ were moving across the border ‘from March onwards’ and by ‘the end of April’ over 100 new posts had been secured by Pakistani troops. India’s intelligence and military failures meant that the Indian army did not react to what was happening till early May. A border battle followed, involving 1,000 fighters from Pakistan (its own troops and Afghan and other Islamic militants or ‘freedom fighters’) that brought the two nuclear powers to the brink of war. The action ended when Sharif went to see President Bill Clinton in Washington in July and agreed, apparently contentedly, to withdraw Pakistani troops, having already been refused help on a visit to Beijing, which remained neutral.
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Since then, Sharif has repeatedly said he was not informed in advance,
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but Musharraf claimed in
Line of Fire
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that he had been briefed on three occasions, the second time at Kel.
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An Indian report in 2006, based on alleged Indian phone tap transcripts, however supports the Sharif line and says he was not told till May
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. Mani Dixit, a former Indian foreign secretary, wrote in a book published in 2002 that Sharif was briefed ‘at the general headquarters of the Pakistan Army in Rawalpindi in January 1999’.
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The controversy continues – as recently as January 2013, a retired Pakistani army general claimed Kargil was planned by a ‘four-man show’ run by Musharraf, though Sharif had ‘not’ been kept totally in the dark.
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A Novelist’s War Secret

As a footnote to the story, having missed my scoop at Kel, I was forewarned of the Kargil offensive by Humphrey Hawksley, an old friend and a BBC journalist. He was in Pakistan at the end of February 1999 researching a novel called
Dragonfire
that was published a year later
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. He came to Delhi on 1 March and told me confidentially that (as a novelist researching material) he had been informed in Pakistan that there would soon be a cross-border invasion. I laughed and said that could not be correct because, just eleven days earlier, Vajpayee had done his bus trip to Lahore, but Hawksley was sure.

He later explained what happened in a (non-fiction) book,
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where he wrote that a former head of the ISI had told him that ‘Pakistan needed to conduct military operations inside India and that would happen very soon’. (This was an intriguing example of how journalists are trusted more when they switch roles and become novelists!). In
Dragonfire,
Hawksley utilized the former ISI chief’s Briefing, and Pakistan invaded India. He also included a nuclear attack on India, which derived from another conversation with a former top Pakistani diplomat, who told him that ‘although we say the use of the [nuclear] bomb would be our last resort, it would in fact be our first resort’.
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The Pakistani diplomat’s argument was that, because India’s conventional forces would be so overwhelming, the only way they could be stopped would be with nuclear weapons. ‘Therefore last resort becomes first resort,’ says Hawksley.
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The extent of the Pakistan civilian government’s prior knowledge and approval of the Kargil affair is significant because it goes to the heart of how much India can now trust peace initiatives from Sharif, as well as other civilian leaders. Would Sharif have taken a foreign correspondent on the trip if he had known how sensitive it was? And even if he thought it safe with a business-oriented
Fortune
reporter, his spokesman had also invited Ken Cooper of
The Washington Post.
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Cooper did not come because of an appointment elsewhere, but might have been more focused on border questions. So maybe Sharif did not know what he would be told, or at least not its full extent and implications – and maybe, as others have suggested, he was not fully briefed.